Raising kids is easy, parenting is hard
Let's lower the bar back to the level of a 15th century peasant
Raising children has never been easier. Parenting has never been harder.
Here’s what I mean by those seemingly paradoxical statements.
Raising children is easier
Before the 1900s:
- 1 in 10 infants died before their first birthday
- About 48% of children died before they turned 15
- Only 21% of adults were literate
- The maximum life expectancy was less than 60 years
- Diseases such as smallpox, polio, measles, mumps, and rubella caused widespread infection and death
- Workers would typically work 60-70 hours per week, 50 weeks every year, with many children included in that workforce
Today:
- The chance that your baby will die before they turn one is 20 times less than it used to be
- In highly developed nations, 99.7% of children reach the age of 15
- More than 86% of adults worldwide are literate
- Maximum life expectancy is around 90 years, and increasing at the rate of 3 months every year
- Smallpox has been eliminated worldwide, and many parts of the world have eliminated polio, measles, mumps, and rubella.
- Working hours have decreased by about 50%, and child labour rates have plummeted
Raising children has never been easier. Our children live longer, live healthier, are more educated, and have better work-life balance than ever before. They are objectively going to have a better life than at any other time in history – they aren’t going to die from a simple bacterial infection, they have access to medical technologies unimaginable a century ago, they are more likely than ever to not just graduate primary school but also go on to receive a degree in higher education. They can eat bananas, oranges, and chocolate whenever they want. They can travel the world without risking scurvy. They can access all the information and entertainment the world has to offer with a few taps on a screen. Our concerns for our children are no longer so intimately about life and death matters.
Which is great! Raising children to adulthood, and to a good adulthood, is easy.
Slow life strategy
Yet with our children living longer, healthier lives, we see something that is called the “slow life strategy”. In essence, we’re shifting from a fast reproductive strategy (think rabbits), where we have loads of kids and hope some make it to adulthood, and are instead shifting towards a slow reproductive strategy (think elephants), where we make huge investments in fewer offspring.
This is something that Jean Twenge, author of Generations, has studied extensively (for example, here). In an interview with Ezra Klein, she said;
“Kids are less independent. Teenagers are less likely to get their driver’s license, to go out with their friends, to drink alcohol, to have sex, to have a paid job. Young adults take longer to get married and have kids and settle into a career. Middle aged people look and feel younger than their parents and grandparents did at the same age, so 60 is the new 50, this type of idea, because lives last longer, so that trajectory slows down.”
While the slow life trajectory is great on many levels, there is one element that is having a huge negative impact… the intensity with which we parent.
Intensive parenting
Up until the last few decades, intensive parenting wasn’t a thing… like, at all. Families had lots of children, parents had to provide for all those children, and many of the time-saving devices that we take for granted simply hadn’t been invented. There wasn’t enough time or money to go around to intensively parent each child.
However, within the last couple of generations, there’s been a big shift. Societal changes have led to smaller families, and with fewer kids parents have had the opportunity to invest more in their children. Time and money aren’t being divided between as many kids, so each child is the beneficiary of a larger investment. Instead of each child being supported in one extra-curricular activity (or zero formal, structured extra-curriculars as was the norm a few generations ago), children are now ferried between gymnastics, swimming lessons, and basketball. Instead of each child relying on older siblings to help them with tough homework questions or being left to figure it out for themselves, children may now have access to private tutors across several different subjects. Instead of dealing with sibling and friendship squabbles independently, children now have playdates arranged for them, social interactions carefully monitored, and disagreements between peers resolved by adults.
Ultimately intensive parenting isn’t just possible now. It’s the norm.
While intensive parenting seems great on the surface, it’s not great for kids, and it’s really not great for parents.
See, we might believe that we are providing opportunity and support for physical development, health, and psychological wellbeing by enrolling our child in many different sports programs. Yet the truth is that they would get similar physical and psychological health benefits with unstructured physical play, with the added benefit of a lower risk of injury.
We might think that hiring a tutor will help boost our child’s academic achievement, with the ultimate goal of helping them get into a prestigious university and then on to a career with high-earning potential. Yet private tutoring doesn’t offer good returns on the investment, with minimal evidence that it is effective (with studies from Germany to China showing that there is no positive effect of tutoring over and above the influence of student motivation and sociodemographic variables) and some evidence that it negatively impacts student mental health (through increasing social comparison, stress, and sleep deprivation).
We might think that mediating squabbles and carefully monitoring their social interactions is the best way to ensure that no one’s feelings get hurt, and it probably is. Yet the truth is that kids would do better with more opportunities to hurt each other’s feelings – getting it wrong is an important step along the path of learning to get it right. And helicopter parenting (the pinnacle of intensive parenting) is associated with negative impact on socio-emotional learning and pro-social outcomes– both when our kids are younger and extending into young adulthood.
Parenting is harder
We’ve seen that intensive parenting isn’t great for our kids’ physical development, their academic achievement, or their social lives. Yet even if intensive parenting was, in fact, good for the kids, it’s still not worth doing because of its impact on us, the parents.
Intensive parenting is literally killing us.
It is associated with lower life satisfaction, and increased stress and levels of depression. Additionally, in countries where intensive parenting is the norm, levels of parental burnout are dramatically higher. Parental burnout itself is related to sleep disturbances and disorders, addiction, and even suicidal ideation.
Unfortunately, evidence shows that the impact of intensive parenting isn’t contained to only those parents who practice intensive parenting. As the authors of one study noted (and thanks to Melinda Wenner Moyer for making me aware of this study):
“Internalizing guilt and the pressure to be the perfect mother are detrimental for mothers regardless of whether or not they subscribe to intensive motherhood ideologies.”
Intensive parenting is so widespread that everyone suffers – either from burning out trying to live up to an unattainable perfect standard, or from feeling guilt about not even trying. And intensive parenting is so ingrained that many parents don’t even realise that they’re doing it, assuming that their level of over-protectiveness and engagement in their child’s life is normal and appropriate.
This is why parenting is harder.
Shifting goalposts
The goalposts have shifted. The bar has been raised.
We no longer feel satisfied that our children are literate. We now only feel like “good” parents if our child makes it into a prestigious university.
We no longer feel grateful that our children don’t work in a coal mine at the age of 12. We now expect them to make it as partner in a law firm, or become a doctor, or launch a multi-billion-dollar tech firm.
We no longer think that it’s a miracle that our child is simply alive and healthy at the age of 15. We only think that they’re physically in good condition if they’ve made it onto the school’s swimming or track team.
But what if we lowered the bar? Brought those goalposts back a bit?
We don’t need to make it harder for ourselves by thinking that we’re only good parents if… if… if… Simply stated, your kid has a better chance of succeeding in this world than at any other time in history. That is a fact, irrespective of whether or not you read to them 15 minutes a night or enrol them in violin classes. So when you next feel guilty about the fact that your child will be in therapy one day, talking about how terrible their childhood was because you [insert something you did “wrong” that was never a concern before the goalposts shifted], remind yourself that at almost any other point in history, therapy didn’t even exist.
I'd love to hear your thoughts! How are you going to lower the bar? Personally, next time my kids complain about brushing their teeth, I’m going to let them know that “teeth” was a leading cause of death 400 years ago.
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